Inequalities in Life-Course Exposure to Gun Violence

Charles C. Lanfear

Robert J. Sampson

David S. Kirk

Rebecca Bucci

Homicide in Chicago

Questions

 

To what extent were individuals growing up in Chicago in this period exposed to gun violence?

 

And how does this exposure differ…

… by race and sex?

… by neighbourhood context?

The

Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods

  • 6200 children in 7 birth cohorts
  • 3 interviews from 1995–2002
  • Community surveys in 1995 and 2002

Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods

  • 6200 children in 7 birth cohorts
  • 3 interviews from 1995–2002
  • Community surveys in 1995 and 2002

PHDCN+

  • Representative sample of 4 cohorts
  • 1057 interviewed in 2012
  • 682 followed-up in 2021

See Sampson, Kirk, & Bucci (2022)

Timeline

Contexts of Violence

Life-Course Exposures to Gun Violence

Measures

  • Has the respondent ever seen someone else get shot?
    • If so, at what age? (only wave 2)
  • Has the respondent ever been shot?
    • If so, at what age? (waves 2 & 5)

Problem: Interval censoring

Method: Non-parametric MLE (Turnbull 1976)

Seen shot: race/ethnicity

Been shot: race/ethnicity

Seen shot: sex

Been shot: sex

Risk and Protective Factors

Additional Measures

  • Cohort
  • Immigrant generation
  • Childhood neighbourhood context
    • Collective efficacy
    • Disadvantage
    • Homicide rate

Method: Semi-parametric proportional hazards MLE (Anderson-Bergman 2017)

Hazard Model Estimates

Predictions: Individuals

Predictions: Neighborhoods

Takeaways

  • Being shot occurs later in life than seeing shootings

  • Only Black and Hispanic respondents were shot in adulthood

  • Seeing shootings much less common for white respondents

  • Mainly males are shot, but female respondents witness nearly as many shootings

  • Neighbourhood context during childhood consequential mainly for seeing shootings

Feedback and Questions

Contact:

Charles C. Lanfear
Institute of Criminology
University of Cambridge
cl948@cam.ac.uk

For more about the PHDCN+:

PHDCN@fas.harvard.edu
https://sites.harvard.edu/phdcn/
https://doi.org/10.1007/s40865-022-00203-0

Appendix

References

Sampson, Kirk, & Bucci. 2022. “Cohort Profile: Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and Its Additions (PHDCN+).” Journal of Developmental and Life-Course Criminology 8.

Turnbull. 1976. “The empirical distribution function with arbitrarily grouped, censored and truncated data.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Methodological) 38(3):290-295.

Anderson-Bergman. 2017. “icenReg: Regression models for interval censored data in R.” Journal of Statistical Software 81(12):1–23.